How to Generate 3X More Leads in 5 Weeks On LinkedIn (Step-By-Step and Without Spending a Fortune)

Learn the 5 ways how LinkedIn marketing pros generate up to 200 leads a day using very actionable steps (Even if you are new to LinkedIn)

Social media marketing is a necessary and highly successful approach to raising awareness, generating leads, nurturing and converting B2C leads to customers. But can the same be said of B2B lead generation? If you answered “No” to that question, you might be missing one of the best B2B lead generation platforms of the decade.

But it is not your fault. Like many B2B marketers, you might have thought LinkedIn as the largest resume platform in the world—and not much of a powerful lead generation accelerator.

Many marketers have traditionally thought of LinkedIn as a prospecting, hiring and one-dimensional advertising network. There is more to LinkedIn than posting work histories.

Here are a couple of LinkedIn marketing statistics every marketer—digital or not—will find interesting, for example:

LinkedIn has over 562 million members, covering 200 countries and territories—the largest professional social network around

LinkedIn receives 260 million unique monthly visits as of March 2017—Apptopia

40% of the 260 million use LinkedIn daily

3 million professionals share their content on LinkedIn

More than any other social network, LinkedIn hosts higher user profile authenticity (e.g. company, position and job title)

Are you taking full advantage of LinkedIn to generate new business?

This guide is dedicated to helping you discover powerful ways to turn your LinkedIn lead generation strategy on and accelerating to 100 to 200 leads a day in 5 weeks. The key to getting there is to not only read the insider information packed herein but to also go ahead and consistently practice what you’ll learn.

But, before we get right to it, how about finding out why you and your business need LinkedIn. Here are incredible LinkedIn statistics in 2018 demonstrating why LinkedIn is important to your business and digital marketing strategy altogether:

LinkedIn surveyed companies and found 65% said their LinkedIn marketing strategy was successful

There are about 19 million LinkedIn company pages

LinkedIn is a full funnel professional platform where people gather around to make things happen—not, well, share cat videos.

97% of B2B marketers in the US use LinkedIn for business compared to 63% of B2C marketers, revealing LinkedIn’s popularity as a B2B social networking platform

Out of the 61 million senior level influencers on LinkedIn, 40 million are in decision-making positions

The average influencer post garners about 30,000 views

42% of influencer followers are company-director-level and above while 22% are entry-level—LinkedIn

That said, there are ways to attract more, highly-targeted and qualified leads on LinkedIn.

1. Use Keyword Research to Hone in On Your Target Audience

The first step to zeroing in on the most profitable LinkedIn market is to identify your LinkedIn target audience. Is that easy to do? Not according to the 42% of marketers who do not know how to gather the right data to kickstart targeted campaigns. Neither is it impossible or even that difficult.

The simpler way to understand your LinkedIn target audience is to start by listing down a number of keywords that interest people in your niche or those that have similar interests and goals. Then you’ll want to use LinkedIn Search to search your keywords among groups that identify with your keywords. Feel free to use as many highly relevant keywords as you can find.

While keywords are popular for SEO purposes, they are also psychological triggers. That means LinkedIn users are more likely to join a group using a specific keyword that they are interested in.

For example:

Searching “Healthcare” will turn around results specific to that niche including healthcare pages, companies, and groups on LinkedIn.

It is all about specificity. And groups that use specific keywords in their names attract like-minded professionals working or conducting business in that niche or industry.

2. Create What Your LinkedIn Target Market Wants

This is important.

You do not want to assume your target audience wants what you think they want. But keenly following up on the types of questions asked, posts that get the most views, thumbs up and comments, for example, you can understand what they truly want.

You want to use that insight to create on-demand lead magnets. Those lead magnets will seek to offer a solution to what is keeping many groups’ members awake.

Remember to monitor several groups. The more you do the higher the likelihood you’ll create an ebook, report, article, or other lead magnet form that appeals to multiple groups’ members.

You’ll need the lead magnet in the next LinkedIn lead generation acceleration step up next.

3. Join Powerful LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn Groups is a neat, powerful feature many B2B marketers are still to take full benefits from. You can join up to 50 LinkedIn groups. On the Search filter tool, select “groups” and then key in your keyword to find targeted groups to join.

You’ll want to join the groups that have:

Over 1,000 or more members. The more members there are the higher the number of potential prospects for you

Your targeted keywords. Your prospects are likely to have joined or plan to join the group since it evokes their interest.

Not being named around a brand or specific business name. They are not a sales pitch arena but a networking community

a. Initially, Do Not Focus on Selling on LinkedIn

LinkedIn users are business people or professionals that can see through your sales pitch from a mile out.

Moreover, unveiling your selling agenda too early—without making considerable effort to offer answers, spark valuable conversations, and such—will discourage group members from trusting you. Group owners can delete your membership and ban you for that, as well.

The larger problem with that:

If you are banned from a group and labeled a traffic pest or spammer, LinkedIn will ban you from other groups or joining others, too. That would be the end of your LinkedIn marketing road as far as this guide is concerned. And you do not want that.

b. Contribute Meaningfully

Dedicate yourself to commenting only. You’ll want to do that for 2-3 weeks—without posting any lead magnets or links to your product/service or website. The point is to offer valuable information that will increase your credibility, authority, and grow your influence as a knowledgeable contributor and solutions provider.

Here’s the benefit:

LinkedIn group owners have to approve comments before the posts can go live. An owner who sees you offering valuable insights for free for over 2 weeks is likely to set your posts to auto-approve.

That means your posts would no longer have to peg in pending status before reaching the larger target audience within LinkedIn groups you have joined.

c. Promote Sensibly

As your posts auto-approve, and you continue to offer useful insights, more group members are likely to be aware of your solutions provision capability.

Now you can post a lead magnet.

Choose to use this tactic once per week or bi-weekly.

No spamming. No group bans.

Be sure to include a specific call to action with or within your lead magnet. But you can also post a link for interested members to follow if they want to download a relevant resource such as an ebook for a specific solution they seek.

It could be a link to a dedicated landing page or website homepage—not the product or service pages, which are too direct.

The whole point is to get potential leads to your website, provide their contact details to get the lead magnet (such as a niche survey or special report), so you can follow up with your marketing system in future.

Keep in mind, 63% of website visitors are not ready to buy yet (Marketing Donut).

4. When is the Best Time to Post on LinkedIn?

HubSpot found the best time to post on LinkedIn is 5-6 pm, Tuesday through Thursday.

To boost LinkedIn post shares, the best time to post is 1-2 pm ET. And for optimal clickthroughs, 7-8 am, noon and 5-6 pm will help convert interested group members to highly targeted leads.

Moreover, LinkedIn sends a Daily Digest email of groups’ daily activities. You can get featured on it and broadcast your message to an even more targeted and larger audience by posting your content between 8 am and 9 am US Eastern Time.

That means more targeted views and potential clickthroughs to your lead magnet (and ultimately your website) from thousands of group members and LinkedIn network professionals—millions of which are decision makers at their company.

Powerful.

5. Getting Leads by Creating a LinkedIn Group

Better yet, you can create a LinkedIn group. LinkedIn allows you to create up to 10 groups free of charge. If you choose, you can create an additional 20 sub-groups under the main group—a sub-niche under each of the 10.

Creating a LinkedIn group is important for several incredible reasons—even better compared to joining owned groups.

You will have privileges you would never have as a joining member.

You get to send an email announcement on a weekly basis—reaching as many targeted people as your group hosts, including the once-a-week email announcement to all different sub-groups. 78% of marketers do not offer that kind of weekly nurturing to increase conversions.

You can send invites to highly targeted LinkedIn members, creating a super-targeted group membership that is likely to convert in a short period of time

You can use direct messages to engage members

You get to send a custom Welcome Email to every new member that joins your group Following up a lead within 5 minutes like that increases the probability of them buying from you by 9 times (InsideSales)

You’ll be able to post more often, including your lead magnet in more posts—which means more views, clickthroughs, and conversions for you

You can grow your LinkedIn Group to thousands of targeted members—raising your credibility and authority in your niche

You can accept third-party offers or promote third-party requests for extra revenue (when they are relevant to your group members’ interest)

How is that?

There are only a few things to keep in mind (and these are important):

You can, once in a while, promote your product or service. You can add a link to a lead magnet or lead capture page within the Welcome Message.

Also, you can share group roles, responsibilities and restrictions in the same email message.

Here, you want to discourage spamming, irrelevancy, and outright chaos by letting everyone know what is expected of them. That is to help preserve the integrity and authority of the entire group for longer.

If you want, you can use a moderator to keep things clean and professional in the group.

However, only post offers that are highly relevant to most members’ need to solve a specific problem. You do not want to push members away with incessant sales messages. And neither do you want members to feel like the group is all about you or your offer other than a networking community.

The latter reason is also why it is not recommended to use a business name, logo, or contacts when naming your new LinkedIn group. Again, LinkedIn is a professionals networking platform.

You have busy professionals that are looking for ideas, inspiration, networking, solutions, and so on, within a community of like-minded or similarly-interested pool of professionals. Branding your business in their face at every opportunity will be overkill.

The goal, like when you join owned, top groups on LinkedIn, is to connect, offer valuable information, brainstorm, and solve problems.

To boost your LinkedIn group engagement and encourage group growth, you can find valuable resources such as the LinkedIn Company Page Playbook and borrow inspiration from the top company pages on LinkedIn.

Conclusion

Using LinkedIn to generate highly targeted leads is a powerful approach to boost your lead generation strategy in 2018 and beyond. Thousands of more professionals are joining LinkedIn every other day.

That means the above LinkedIn lead generation techniques can help you to successfully triple or generate between 100-500 leads every other day, well into the next couple of years.

After your initial “contribute meaningfully” two-week stage, you can use a relevant lead magnet to implement in the following three weeks.

Remember, this is not a magic LinkedIn lead generation technique. You are going to want to practice the LinkedIn marketing tips herein to grow your email list and ultimately increase your sales.